RE: Fixing salvo missiles

G'day,

> The "place missile marker, then it looks for targets"
> is really the biggest problem.  We use a "maneuver the
> missile to a specified target" house rule, similar to
> MT missiles. This is the part that we gave up as "never
> going to change".

Combining my answer to this and the final question of yours ("Do you
mean a scale of warhead sizes traded against range or warhead
*types*").... One of the compelling things for me in moving to missiles
that can have different warhead types or a trade-off between range and
warhead strength (to me they're all just different kinds of missiles as
I would presume you have to note before game what trade-off you chose or
did you mean an on the fly tradeoff?) is that you can easily grade from
something like a classic MT to a classic SM without as sharp a
discontinuity.	

> The close second is the "1d6 missiles lock-on".  We feel
> that missiles should be much smarter than this, and the
> vast majority of misses should come from PDS or evasive
> defenses such as Stealth Hull or ECM....

Given those features weren't covered as standard in the original FB
couldn't you argue the roll was representing that and that you only need
to adopt modifications such as the ones you've put forward as stealth
and ECM become explicit rather than implicit. I'm guessing you do have
more explicit sensor stuff?

> Additionally, the "1d6 lock" mechanic limits the launchers to
> salvos in multiples of 6.  a "roll to-hit per missile" mechanic
> allows for future development of a range of SML/Rs with varying
> numbers of missiles.

Good point.

> For our group, having a box top on the table and rolling
> handfuls of dice is no deterent. 

Its not for us either, we have a bucket of >100 D6 dice of various
colours and you pull what you need. Still sounds like a lot of extra
rolling if you then have ECM/PDS on top and then attack. Given adding
sensors to the game fullstop has run into dice-rolling bottlenecks (even
when only rolling per FC) I can just see rolling for 240 odd missiles in
a decent round of missile fire as adding a bit of time to the game ;)

I am also imaging the chaos of tracking which missile went where if you
also allow misses to try and re-lock on a new target. I'm not saying
it's a bad idea, its actually a nice idea, I'm just trying to think of
the implications for our playing style.

> No.  My group plays cinematic....
> To change my suggestion ito Vector, just divide all the listed
> ranges by 2 (wild guess here, based on 6-3 FB rules).

That takes you down to half mu something I'm not overly keen on. For
someone who doesn't want to go that route would you think just using
every other entry you gave would work as well in practice (so 2+, 4+,
6+)?

Cheers

Beth